


there's no point trying to arrange wild flowers

by everythingislove (straykid), puddingandpie



Category: SKAM (Norway)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Relationships, References to Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 14:45:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13953828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straykid/pseuds/everythingislove, https://archiveofourown.org/users/puddingandpie/pseuds/puddingandpie
Summary: So Eva finds herself standing in front of his house, ringing the doorbell over and over again. She doesn’t know if he’s in or not, but she doesn’t have anything better to do that to wait him out and rip this confrontation off like a bandaid.Her answer to whether Isak is home or not comes a few minutes later, when the door peeks open only to be abruptly stopped by the chain which is keeping the door locked.“Isak?” she calls, her voice a little too sharp. The door immediately slams shut. Eva takes a deep breath to try and calm herself a little, take the edge out of her tone, and tries again. “Isak? Can we talk?”or; what would have happened if eva had arrived first and not jonas in episode 10





	there's no point trying to arrange wild flowers

**Author's Note:**

> hello!!! we’re back again with another fic, this time as part of the evakteket birthday challenge which is fun and new. we thought it would be interesting to write a fic focusing on friendship rather than lovers, and this is the product of that. we hope you all enjoy!!!
> 
> our tags were: caught red handed, canon divergence, and bed sharing.

Whenever she feels mad, she tries to take at least twenty four hours before she goes and sorts it out. Sometimes the anger she feels is anger that is going to go away, but after the twenty four hours have come and gone the anger inside Eva only feels stronger and more potent.

She thinks about telling Noora, or maybe Sana, but what could they do? They didn’t know Isak like she did, because they didn’t spend a lazy summer month with him learning about themselves and the world on the banks of a grassy hill. It turns out now that she didn’t know Isak like she thought she did at all, because it was him that sent the tips in, not Chris like she thought.

In the day she has taken to try and work out what she’s going to do about it, she hasn’t been able to come to a reasonable conclusion about why he would do it either; why he would betray her like that. She thought they were friends.

So Eva finds herself standing in front of his house, ringing the doorbell over and over again. She doesn’t know if he’s in or not, but she doesn’t have anything better to do that to wait him out and rip this confrontation off like a bandaid.

Her answer to whether Isak is home or not comes a few minutes later, when the door peeks open only to be abruptly stopped by the chain which is keeping the door locked.

“Isak?” she calls, her voice a little too sharp. The door immediately slams shut. Eva takes a deep breath to try and calm herself a little, take the edge out of her tone, and tries again. “Isak? Can we talk?”

The chain makes a noise as it hits the door, a sign that the person on the other end has unlocked it. The handle turns and the door opens wider now, and Isak’s face stares back at her. He’s cowering in the door, his face blotchy and his eyes red-rimmed. There’s a cut underneath his eye, fresh but just starting to scab over. His hands are clenched so tight that his knuckles have gone white, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was cutting half moons into his palm.

“Do you want to…” Eva says, before stopping and realising that the walk she was about to offer probably wouldn't be accepted when Isak was in this state. “Can I come in?”

Isak doesn’t reply. His shoulders sink a little more, but he steps aside to let her in anyway.

The house that she enters is a mess. There are heavy black markings on the walls, some of the paint still dripping onto the floor below. Plates are smashed, one of the couches has been turned on its side, and there is a knife prominently sticking out of the television opposite her. Her whole body tenses up, because the situation around her is terrifying, terrifying in that unnerving way that you can’t seem to shake.

Isak seems to be just as terrified, not even bothering to hide it. The anger that Eva came here with fades into the background now, replaced with concern and worry for him.

He pulls himself up so that he’s sitting on the kitchen counter, and Eva moves over so that she can pull herself up and sit next to him, so close that their shoulders are touching. “What happened Isak?” she whispers, the damage seeming even more insurmountable now that she’s a little higher up. That’s all it takes to set him off though, because next to her Isak starts silently sobbing. She puts his arm around him, brings him in tighter and just lets him cry himself hoarse, because whatever happened here she can tell that he needs it.

When he calms a little, she feels brave enough to ask again. “What happened?”

Anything louder than a whisper feels deafening, her heart pounding against her ribcage. Isak opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a strangled cry, and he drops his head back down so that he doesn’t have to meet her eyes.

“Do you want Jonas?”

Isak suddenly looks back up at her, and if Eva didn’t know any better she would say the first emotion that she saw in his eyes was fear. “Can you stay? Please?”

His voice is quiet, hoarse to the point where she’s sure that it would pain him to use it, but underneath it all it’s scared, and for the moment the whole reason she came over here is forgotten. She lets him guide her up the stairs and into his room, which in comparison to the rest of the house seems sterile and untouched by the madness.

Isak freezes at this point, suddenly unsure of what to do with Eva in his room. But somehow, she does, and before she knows it she’s lying down facing him while he looks up at the ceiling.

It’s a long while before either of them speak again, enough time that it’s now gone dark outside.

“My mum threw a plate at me.”

Instantly, Eva’s entire body runs cold, her stomach dropping in terror. What do you say to that, when someone tells you that their mother threw a plate at them? The cut under his eye suddenly makes sense, and before she can stop herself her brain immediately flies to the worst case scenarios and what could have happened if that plate was just a little higher.

Isak is still staring at the ceiling. “She’s always been devout, but this was…” he pauses, shutting his eyes for a second. Eva can almost see the memory that is playing behind them. “My dad’s gone. He’s taking her to be institutionalised and then after that… after that I don’t think he’s coming back.”

She reaches out and takes his hand, squeezing it tightly. He doesn’t squeeze back, but he doesn’t force her hand off either, so she’s counting that as a win. Eva doesn’t know exactly what going on with Isak’s mother, but the small details he’s given her are enough to know that she’s severely mentally ill, and that that is enough to completely ruin the fragile family structure that was supporting him.

“What are you going to do?”

He shrugs a little, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

There’s a lull in the conversation for a second, before Isak suddenly blurts out, “why are you here?”

Those words bring her back to the anger that she was feeling on the walk here, but all of that feels like it happened so long ago. Sitting in contrast to that anger is the destruction that has happened downstairs, which in contrast makes her problems feel so juvenile.

“I––”

Isak rolls back over onto his back. “You know.”

There’s no room for a question in his statement. She nods.

“It’s not like he’d ever realize,” he mumbles quietly, the sort of quiet that implies she’s not meant to hear it. But she does hear it, and she doesn’t have enough control over herself to monitor her reaction to it. Her face furrows a little, as she tries to work out the exact wording of what Isak just said.

Isak’s whole body stiffens, like he’s just let something slip that he wasn’t supposed to. It’s his reaction that makes her take actual notice of the words, instead of just as something offhanded. It takes Eva a second to put the pieces together, but when she does, it doesn’t feel like a surprise. Instead, something in her heart twists in sympathy, and the anger that she came with begins to slowly unburden itself from her shoulders. “It wasn’t Jonas who you were jealous of, was it?”

He doesn’t reply, but some of the tension gripping him seeps out. His head turns a little, enough that she can see the fear in his eyes.

“That’s okay, you know?” she murmurs. Isak doesn’t respond. But judging by the way that Isak shuffles closer, close enough that they’re touching, she wonders if he ever knew that at all.

Eva has never really found silence comfortable before, and lying here beside Isak she has the same feeling. She feels obligated to say something, because she knows that this conversation isn’t over yet. But when she looks over at him, she can see that his eyes are shut and his breathing has evened out. She doesn’t want to disturb him. He needs this.

The silence feels a little better now that he’s asleep.

 

-

 

“You should be mad at me,” he says, the alarm clock beside him reading 3:21am. She’s almost asleep now, having spent the hours in Isak’s bed trapped in her own mind, thinking about everything thats happened in her life over the past eight weeks, but she pushes that sleep away for just a moment. Anything that Eva can give Isak right now, she will.

She takes a moment to think about his words though, because the implied question there is important, and its even more important that she gets her answer right. There are a lot of emotions bubbling up inside of her, but when she looks at them all in close detail, she realises that the anger she came over to Isak’s house with has left her. “I’m not. Not anymore.”

“Okay.”

She can tell that he doesn’t really believe her, but he doesn’t turn away from her, so Eva counts that as a win.

 

-

 

She’s startled awake by someone banging on the front door. Isak, much to her surprise, is sleeping through the noise. The clock on the bedside reads 11:21. Eva pushes herself up and carefully weaves through the destruction on the first floor, making her way over to the door.

There’s no hole to peer through to see who’s standing outside, so she just has to open the door and hope to god that the person standing out the front is someone she’s prepared to deal with.

When she opens the door though, her stomach drops. Jonas is dressed as he always is, with his red beanie and blue polo, and he’s clutching his skateboard in one hand. She tries to tame her hair a bit, knowing how it probably looks.

“What are you doing here?” he asks incredulously. She moves out of the doorway and shuts it behind her quietly, praying that Isak doesn’t wake up.

“Isak is a bit upset,” she says quietly. Judging by Jonas’ reaction that was the wrong thing to say, as he tenses up, his grip on the skateboard tightening.

“What do you mean?” he almost spits, staring at her up and down.

Eva glances at the door behind her, exhaling slowly. “He’s got a lot of stuff going on right now. Things that I—that _we_ didn’t know about.”

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean, exactly?” Jonas narrows his eyes. “He’s my best friend. I need to know.”

“It’s not my place to say,” Eva says hesitantly, but upon Jonas’s glare, she falters. “He’s my friend too. I’m looking out for him.”

Jonas runs a hand back through his hair then, shaking his head. “He never fucking talks about himself. You know that.”

Eva does know. She’d always figured that Isak was just a private person, and that he would share anything of real importance with them, but finding him so… broken proves how wrong she was.

She wants to tell Jonas everything, to share the burden of knowing their friend’s awful home situation; but she knows that it’s not her place. Isak has trusted her, and she can’t wreck that while he’s in such a sensitive state. She bites the fleshy part of the inside of her cheek, giving him an apologetic expression,

“I would tell you if I could,” she murmurs. “All I can say is that he’s not in the best place right now.”

“Well if you can’t explain what’s going on with him, maybe you could try explaining why you’re here to begin with?” Jonas asks. “Since when do you two hang out on your own?”

“We’re friends,” Eva says slowly. “I’m—what are you implying, Jonas?”

“I’m not implying anything.”

“It doesn’t sound that way.”

The two stare at one another for a few tense moments, and suddenly Eva finds herself yearning for their pre-Nissen days. Everything was so much more simple before high school; before she and Jonas had ever decided to try having a relationship together.

She hates to reduce their time together to nothing more than puppy love, but she knows that’s likely all that it will amount to. In the end, their months together would never make up for the shattered foundations of their friendship in the aftermath of their breakup.

“He’s not in the best place right now,” she repeats eventually, “and because I’m his _friend_ I wanted to be here for him. He needs support.” It’s not the entire truth, of course, but it’s the most believable lie that she can come up with. That’s the wrong thing to say though, because Eva watches how Jonas’ face suddenly gets mad, his hands beside him clenching up into fists.

“So your best idea was what… to come over and fuck him?” Jonas gestures at her hair, which she already had attempted to make look better. There was something about the tone of his voice and the nasty way in which he was implying it that made her blood boil.

“He’s gay!” she blurts, clapping her hand over her mouth the moment she says it. Jonas’ eyes widen, clearly not expecting it.

“What?” he says under his breath, looking up at Isak’s bedroom window. Eva moves a little closer to him. “No he’s–”

The words he’s trying to say die, perhaps because Jonas has no idea what he’s supposed to say to that. Eva has no idea either.

“I think you need to go Jonas,” Eva pleads. Jonas takes a step forward, shot up with a boost of bravery. When he actually gets closer, he goes back to his deflated self.

“I’m his best friend, Eva. He _needs_ me, alright?” His voice breaks a little at the end, like what he’s seeing right now is making him doubt that. “He needs me.”

Before she really registers it, Jonas has pushed past her and into the destroyed house. The moment that he hits it, he stops. She’s not far behind him, but she wasn’t fast enough to stop him from seeing it all.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, scanning the room and trying to remember how the room used to look. His eyes linger on the upturned couch, and then on the knife that sticks out of the wall. “Holy shit.”

One of the stairs creaks, and Jonas’ head whips around faster than Eva can track the movements. It’s Isak, standing with his shoulders hunched and looking like he’s almost drowning in a massive gray sweater which hangs limply off of his frail body.

In the whole time that Eva has known the two of them, she’s never known the two of them to be tactile with each other. Knowing what she knows now, maybe that was because of Isak and his desperate desire to repress everything.

The moment she’s witnessing now is different to anything else. Jonas has his arms wrapped tightly around Isak, which is the catalyst for the final strings which are hanging over Isak to be cut. There’s no more energy left in him; it’s all been wrung out like a dishcloth filled with his own tears.

“You should have told me that your mum was getting bad,” Jonas scolds, but there’s no heat behind his words.

Isak shrugs, looking down at the floorboards, unable to meet Jonas’ eyes. “I didn’t need your pity.”

The two of them send Isak back upstairs, mostly to save him from having to hear Eva recount his sins, and sitting in Isak’s broken kitchen Eva lets the whole story tumble out of her mouth. From the advice he had given her, all the way to the anonymous tip he had sent in. Everything.

Jonas doesn’t react to any of it. He just leans his head back against one of the still intact kitchen counters and shuts his eyes, taking deep breaths in order to ground himself.

When his eyes open again, they’re pained. “Why didn’t he come to me Eva?”

She smiles wryly. “Would you have gone to him?”

Eva can tell that that’s the moment where Jonas understands how big this is to Isak, and how much shame is inside him right now. It would have taken the most incredible amount of courage for Isak to tell Jonas, and if Eva’s right, he would have been working up that courage for weeks and weeks, put off everytime Elias showed his face.

“What do we do?” Jonas asks then, rubbing his face with his hands. “How do we help him?”

Eva shrugs. “We follow his lead. That’s all we can do.”

There’s a long pause then, where Eva waits for Jonas to do something so she knows what he wants to do. Instead of getting up and going to Isak however, he asks her another question. “What did you mean before? About him–– about him being gay?”  
She was waiting for this, but it doesn’t make the answer less hard. “When he sent in the tip, to break you and I up, he didn’t do it because he was jealous of you. He did it because he was jealous of me.”

Jonas’ eyes widen, his mouth falling open slightly. “He–– he likes me?”

Eva nods.

“Fuck,” Jonas says dumbly.

The footsteps that dash quickly up the stairs are loud and obvious, and Eva suddenly realises that Isak has been standing at the stairs the whole time.

“Fuck!” Jonas repeats, but this time he sounds mad. He shoots the empty stairs a pained expression, before flitting his gaze back to Eva. “I need to go talk to him.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea right now?” Eva asks meekly. She knows that Jonas would never intentionally hurt Isak, but they’ve already fucked this situation up enough.

Jonas doesn’t respond. He shoulders his way past her, and promptly leaves the kitchen.

Eva exhales, and the breath sounds so loud amidst the silence of the kitchen. After a moment, she follows after him, trailing up the stairs to Isak’s bedroom. The door is slightly ajar, and she can see Jonas standing beside the bed. She goes to move into the room, but she hesitates when she realizes that Jonas is saying something to Isak. Isak looks incredibly uncomfortable.

“—I just want to talk to you, man.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Isak mutters, rolling onto his side so that he’s facing away from him.

“I think there is,” Jonas sits down on the edge of the bed, frowning. “This entire situation seems pretty shitty for you, and you’re my best friend. I want to make sure that you’re alright.”

“Shitty for me?” Isak blurts. He dares a glance over his shoulder, and the confusion is written all over his face.

“Yeah,” Jonas nods. “You’re obviously going through a lot right now, and we should have been there for you.”

“You don’t hate me?” Isak asks, his voice miniscule.

“Why would I hate you?” Jonas raises his brows. “You’re my best friend, man.”

Isak winces, and Eva nearly facepalms. _Friendzone him, Jonas. Great plan._

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jonas’ lips tilt down at the edges. “I only meant that I’m not going to throw away years of friendship over something we have no control over. It’s chill, man.”

“It’s embarrassing,” Isak corrects, mortified. He rolls back over so that his face is buried into his pillow, and lets out a long groan.

“Isak,” Eva starts from the doorway.

“Fuck off!” The words are muffled, but she hears them loud and clear anyways. “Both of you fuck off! Go make out with one another, and bond about what an asshole I am.”

“We don’t think you’re an asshole,” Eva insists.

“You’re human,” Jonas agrees. “Sometimes we fuck up. That’s normal.”

“I guess,” Isak mumbles, slowly pushing himself into a seated position. He still looks wary, but Eva can’t blame him for that.

“And I mean–– who wouldn’t have had a crush on me,” Jonas laughs, checking Isak lightly in the shoulder. It’s the right thing to say, because Isak begins to smile, his cheeks pushing upward against his eyes which makes the tears that were previously welled up in the tear ducts fall faster.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. The sound feels a lot louder in the small room.

Jonas slings his arm around Isak and brings him a little closer. “Hey, don’t be sorry, alright? You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Eva knows that that’s the end of this conversation for the moment. Jonas looks up at Eva, the two of them making eye contact. She can read the sadness and the hurt in his eyes, but she was surprised to see the sheer guilt that was there as well, mostly coming from the fact that he had no idea.

There’s a bit of shuffling as the three of them silently rearrange themselves, squashing themselves tightly three a pair onto his bed. It’s only midday now, but they’re all tired enough to just lie down and be. Isak finds himself in the middle, Eva on one side and Jonas on the other. She wonders halfheartedly if he’s too hot, or whether they’re suffocating him in the middle, but she drifts off to sleep anyway, surrounded by two people whom she cares so so deeply about. 

-

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is always appreciated :)


End file.
